


love, purpose, belonging

by frahnkocean



Category: Percy Jackson and the Olympians & Related Fandoms - All Media Types, Percy Jackson and the Olympians - Rick Riordan
Genre: Cancer, F/F, Gift, Sick Fic, wlwsecretsanta17
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-01-05
Updated: 2018-01-05
Packaged: 2019-02-28 15:20:00
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 4
Words: 3,688
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13274229
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/frahnkocean/pseuds/frahnkocean
Summary: People used to believe in elephant graveyards, sanctuaries of the old and dying, a place to perish away from the herd, not hindering the progress of those they left behind. The hospital, Piper believed, was definitely one of those places.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Merry Christmas and Happy New Year to pjolesbian! Hope you enjoy <3

Part 1 People used to believe in elephant graveyards – sanctuaries of the old and dying, a place to perish away from the herd, not hindering the progress of those they left behind. The hospital, Piper thought, must be one of those places.

Her breaths came long and laboured, her body wracked intermittently with chills. The tape holding her IV in place caught and pulled at the dark hairs on her arm. The skin around it was puffy and red. Piper reached over to touch the skin around it, pushing the board securing it aside slightly. The area felt warm and tight – it really needed to be changed.

She sat up carefully and cast sluggish eyes around in search of her girlfriend. She rasped out her name, then swallowed and tried again.

“Annabeth?”

A head of curly blonde hair appeared over the side of the bed, long fingers already reaching for Piper’s. Piper gingerly tangled their hands together, pulling her girlfriend closer.

“Are you okay? Do you need to call the nurse?” The lines near her eyes deepened with worry and she stroked her thumb softly over the back of Piper’s hand.

Piper shook her head, “No– Yes, I think my IV might need to be changed?” She said, voice hiking up at the end. “But not yet. Can you talk to me for a bit? How was your day?”

Annabeth smiled, nodded and launched into a detailed recount of her day; she had stayed the night at the hospital the day before but had gone home to check on their and fetch Piper some toiletries while she was asleep. Piper leaned back into the cushions and sighed as the metal bars dug into her back through the thin pillow. Still talking, Annabeth reached behind her to fluff them carefully and Piper smiled gratefully. 

Piper was at wits end. 2 years into cancer treatment, 2 years of in and out hospital visits, one and off sickness, and good old, over and under rage. The pleasant drone of her girlfriends played second fiddle of the declarations of unfairness and unbalanced that often overcame her thoughts. Her she was, a 22-year-old at the top of her game woman in all ways but the obvious and dying in a hospitable away from all things good in the world (madness, fucking madness)

She was supposed to have choices! All her life she had never (ever) been forced to do anything. At no point in her life had Piper ever felt so trapped and stuck in an impossible situation, and Cancer was just that – an impossible situation. When you have cancer you two choices really, do what the doctor says or–for all intents and purposes–die.

Piper was not particularly inclined towards the latter.

Cancer did not feel like a battle, or some awe-inspiring odyssey. Instead it felt like a series of self-inflicted punishments for having the nerve to get sick and have people care about you at the same time.

Annabeth had spent many long nights thinking and tonight was no different.

She had never seen Piper so weak. Her face was pallid and sunken and dark shadows hung underneath her eyes. She groaned slightly and rolled over, a whimper-like moan coming from her throat. Annabeth brought the trash-can up to her face and pushed sweaty hair off her face will she retched. When she was done she slumped forward into Annabeth’s arms too tired to move.

They had arrived home from Piper’s first infusion just a few hours earlier. Since then she had been throwing up every other hour, plagued by constant migraines and crying on and off. It was nearing 3am and Annabeth was there – awake, stroking her face and lulling her back to sleep.

Annabeth wiped her face, and placed cool towels on her forehead. She pressed kisses to her temples and whispered prayer after prayer. And she thought.

She thought about her friends and her father, about her job and her goals. She thought about Leukaemia and mortality rates, about all the things she planned to do in life and how she couldn’t bear to do any of them alone. She thought about how fucking sick Piper looked when she turned her face just so and the light of the lamp highlighted the deep hollows of her cheeks or the bruises peppering her skin or the red splotches running up and down her arms and legs or the large lumps just underneath her ear lobes or the way her chest rose and fell so fast it was as if her lungs could not work hard enough.

Annabeth thought about Piper. She thought about who she was supposed to blame her grief on but the girl whose bedside vigil she kept. She thought about how she was letting her girlfriend down because she couldn’t save her from this, how worthless she was because she was doing everything she could and it wasn’t enough, she thought about how badly she wanted everything to go back to normal and how if she had to endure one more day of this she would fall completely apart (she said that every night)

Piper whimpered again and pushed at the sheets covering her. As Annabeth moved them away and replaced the towel on Pipers forehead she thought about how it probably didn’t matter.


	2. Chapter 2

Part 2 It was a peculiar afternoon the day Piper first began to lose her hair. Both girls had woken up disgustingly late. The sun already high and fat in the sky when they rolled out of bed. Piper went to shower, but Annabeth preferring to shower at night went to pour a bowl of cereal for brunch. So, she sat, chewing through her Wheaty Bits and contemplating the ants on the windowsill when Piper descended the stairs and trudged lazily past Annabeth towards the kitchen.

She poured herself a bowl. Added milk. Opened a drawer, grabbed a spoon and leaned against the counter to eat it.

Annabeth stared, and stared and stared.

Piper had a massive bald spot.

She didn’t know how to broach the topic, Piper’s her was hugely important to her – the only other time Annabeth had seen her cut it was when her grandfather died. Had Piper seen it? Did she know it was there? Annabeth spent the rest of the day dutifully averting her eyes from the spot, on Piper’s head just above her ear where her ponytail revealed a patch of scalp. It wasn’t until a few days later when Annabeth witnessed Piper obsessively running her hands through her hair and checking her image in every reflective they passed that she realised Piper already knew and was not taking it well. 

It was for this reason that Annabeth sat on the hospital’s cold linoleum with a long brown wig and accompanying Styrofoam bust wedged firmly between her thighs while she wove dove and falcon feathers through it. It had taken months for Annabeth to get her hands on these feathers. The process was ridiculously long and tedious, involving requests to Federal Repositories’ and acquisition of permits, all for feathers that Annabeth had found herself for fuck sake! 

She knew that Piper would miss her hair dearly, she loved it not just aesthetically but spiritually also. Piper took great pride in her heritage, one Annabeth’s favourite places that Piper had taken her to was a Butterfly Dance. Annabeth believed that was when Piper was at her brightest – performing on stage. Beautifully embroidered shawl fanned out around her as she spun, vibrant and jubilant. That day she had fallen truly in love with Piper, long, dark hair tumbling loose around her shoulders and gorgeous brown eyes alight with love, belonging and purpose. Those were the eyes that Annabeth wanted to see again, but they seemed like a wild fantasy compared to Piper’s eyes now, listless and pained. She had seen that purpose again rare now, but strong and bright in the moments just before a treatment, before a long stay in the hospital where Piper often passed some of that strength into her.

She knew she couldn’t help Piper reconcile the loss of her hair with her culture – but she did know that she would always be there to support her (wig in hand).

 

The worst part of chemotherapy was surprisingly not the nausea. For Piper? It was the pain. There were all kinds of it. Often the only way for Piper to move through the haze of it was to categorise them.

In the mornings, there was soft tissue pain. Stiffness from poor posture and a lack of movement through the night pulled her shoulders taut, and bore a sharp, aching pain deep through her back. It rolled over her in waves ebbing and flowing until she could draw herself up from bed and retrieve a heat pack or Annabeth could massage her shoulders and back. Then there was the burning – nerve damage from chemotherapy in the back of her knees and neck, often coming without warning and leaving Piper gasping. Fatigue and nausea kept her mostly immobile after every session, and needing to continue her schooling Annabeth could not be there for her always.

Her life was now measured in a series of cycles, treatment on Tuesday and she would feel fine, pre-medication would stop her from feeling the effects for some days yet. These were often her most active days, Piper would speak to her family over the phone, do whatever work around the house she could and rest in preparation for the coming days of insomnia. 

Wednesday, she would receive a shot to stimulate her white blood cells. This came with bone pain, twisting and burrowing over long, aching periods. It was the kind of pain that felt never ending, as if no amount of medication would relieve the discomfort that felt so deep in her body that it was impenetrable. 

By Friday, nausea set in bringing by 2 nights of vomiting and retching accompanied by a very raw throat and almost inevitably tears. As the effects of the chemotherapy wore off and it began to make its way out of her system Piper neuropathy would set in, leaving her hands and feet hot, achy and plagued with pins and needles. By the next Tuesday she would feel normal again. Then she would have some days at home to recuperate and get some things done before her next session. Fatigue and Migraines would follow her the entire time.

Piper was incredibly tired (of all of it) and she knew that it showed.

Losing her hair was emotionally? Not quite the worst of it. Aside from her spiritual and cultural connections to it, Piper couldn’t stand the thought of being ugly. For all that she disregarded trends and remained purposefully unaware of the world of makeup beyond a concealer tube and lip gloss, Piper couldn’t stand the idea of her hair falling out. She knew that she was attractive and would probably continue to be so even without her long, Jarrah coloured hair. She despised her own shallowness but still could not help but could not help but compare the loss of her hair to that of her physical identity.

But it wasn’t just the loss of her hair that made her this way, it was the sunken cheeks and the puffy pouches under her eyes, the sallow dullness to her dark skin that was once vibrant and glowing. It was yellowing fingernails, the lack of eyelashes, the sparse eyebrows, flaky skin, bed sores, prominent bones, all were things that marked her as sick, diseased. Piper did not venture out into public more than she had to but when she did it was obvious to her that she was standing behind 2-way glass, impossible to penetrate, separated from the world.

Piper was well aware that ‘terminally ill’ was stamped across her forehead, she knew with every half-pitying/half-curious glance that she was no longer considered a human being – but a poor dying soul, a ghost possessing her own body. She had tried talking to Annabeth about it, tried to articulate her need to be seen as a person again but could tell that she didn’t understand. Piper had no one to speak to about what she was feeling, no one that she felt would understand. Her treatment team could tell her everything there was to know about side effects, drugs and symptoms (all her father’s money had seen to that). But what they didn’t know was how trapped she had felt in that body, stretched and pulled in ways it wasn’t meant to be, extended past its reasonable shelf life. How endless platitudes and gifts from friends and family couldn’t breach her sense of isolation, couldn’t change the fact that in the end she was all alone with her fears.


	3. Chapter 3

Part 3 A short of list of things that Piper absolutely loved (in no particular order):

1\. Her Hair  
2\. Annabeth Chase  
3\. The Sound of the Words ‘All Clear’ ( that one especially rn)

Two follow up appointments, countless awkward conversations and breathless phone calls and still those words never lost their sweetness. Piper mouthed the words again and smiled giddily to herself. What a trip. What a wild fucking ride.

Piper pulled on her running shoes and slid her phone into her armband, pressing a light kiss to her girlfriend’s cheek (still in bed) on her way out. She finally felt a little more in control. Like her life wasn’t spiralling out of control in front of her like a dropped ball of yarn. She stopped on her doorstep and breathed in the crisp summer air and smiled again utterly disbelieving. She felt like a demigod – worlds away from the 20-year-old she had been, runner, vegetarian and the picture of good health crying on the bathroom floor because her doctor had told her she had acute lymphocytic leukaemia.

Now four-and-a-half years later, Piper had tried to banish from her mind all things cancer–nausea, ass-bearing hospital gowns, shitty coffee and the bizarre feeling of coming to terms with one’s own mortality¬– and move on with her life. She had a cute little pixie cut and a smile.

She was happy.

Mostly.

In the quiet times Piper did wonder,

(“How do I live a normal life again?”)

Cancer wasn’t kind to her. In the years that she had it she suffered every symptom and side effect there was, her immune system was so compromised that she contracted every illness under the sun, she quit her job, dropped her hobbies and disengaged from her community. And the entire time she was terrified. Of dying, of leaving people behind and things unfinished, of wasting peoples time and the debt she would accumulate for her family. 

She had spent 4 entire years moving between her home and a hospital bed. Her 21st birthday was spent in an isolation ward. Piper was so adjusted to The Cancer Patient Lifestyle that she felt like it was a permanent part of her. So much of her life had revolved around it and now she felt lost and unsure of how to live without it, like unmanned ship cast off a jetty. Piper struggled to let go of the sadness she felt for a life never lost, the grief of what hadn’t yet happened.

She did what her doctor asked with no complaint because she needed something (anything) to do. She was too weak to get a part time job, and she had no idea how to even go about restarting her studies. She was diagnosed in the middle of finals week for fucks sake.

Worse yet, Piper knew Annabeth was disappointed in her. And that’s what really made her feel the worst. Annabeth had stood by her side throughout the entire process, at times putting her entire life on hold to take care of her. And Piper would be eternally grateful for it she knew, but she also knew how hard that had been for her. Had watched the bags underneath her eyes grow steadily deeper, the gorgeous flush of her cheeks become more and more feeble. She knew Annabeth couldn’t even see it herself, she waved off Pipers concern constantly, could find no reason to put herself first, even now just over 6 months post ‘All Clear’.

And now after everything she’d done Piper could tell she was frustrating her more than ever. Plans constantly cancelled, and hard conversations shut down instantly. Piper knew she was using her recovery as a shield but couldn’t stop. 

She remembered what the doctor had said to her that day when she first received her diagnosis.

(“What’s important now is not what happens but how you react to it,”)

Piper couldn’t help but feel like she was reacting all wrong.

   
Annabeth loved Piper with every beat of her heart. There was no angst about it, and even with the unfairness of their situation there had never been a question of staying or leaving. Her own life had been completely secondary to Piper’s. Piper’s worries became her worries and Piper’s pain became hers as well. She dedicated herself completely to helping her get better. And for a while it worked. 

Annabeth was a self-confessed workaholic, and she was well aware that she often used her responsibilities to escape her emotions. Even so, being aware of these things was not enough to prevent her from doing them. Caring for Piper had caused Annabeth to forget about herself completely, her wellbeing was no longer a priority in her eyes. 

She didn’t even feel like she could bring it up with anyone their close friends asked after them both. Bringing cooked meals and groceries, collecting prescriptions, recording lectures, photocopying notes and a million other mindless errands that Annabeth no longer had time for. Through all this they would constant remind her,

“don’t overowkr yourself Annabeth,”  
“remember to take care of yourself too,”  
“slow down every once in a while, wiseass,”

Though well-intentioned Annabeth couldn’t accept any of their advice. It felt incredibly selfish of her to even try. Piper was going through so much pain, and Annabeth hated herself for not being able to do anything about it. Annabeth would never be so self-serving as to make it emotionally about her, but even so. There was nothing left to give.


	4. Chapter 4

Part 4 Many, many years ago when the Earth was still quite new, there was a beautiful butterfly who lost her mate in battle. To show her grief, she took off her beautiful wings and wrapped herself in a drab cocoon. In her sadness, she could not eat and she could not sleep and her relatives kept coming to her lodge to see if she was okay.

Of course she wasn't, but she didn't want to be a burden on her people so she packed up her wings and her medicine bundle and took off on a long journey. She wandered about for many days and months, until finally she had gone all around the world.

On her journey she kept her eyes downcast and stepped on each stone she came to as she crossed fields and creeks and streams. Finally, one day as she was looking down, she happened to notice the stone beneath her feet, and it was so beautiful that it healed her sorrow. 

She then cast aside her cocoon, shook the dust from her wings, and donned them once more. She was so happy she began to dance to give thanks for another chance to begin her life anew. Then she went home and told The People about her long journey and how it had healed her.

Piper had told Annabeth that story some years ago, just before the first of her performances Annabeth had ever taken her to. She’d told the story animatedly, with little asides and personal opinions, describing how the legend had woven itself the fabric of her culture.   
(“To this day, the people dance this dance as an expression of renewal and to give thanks for new season, new life and new beginnings,”)  
   
Glaring lights blinded Piper as she walked out onto the stage, cheers and whistles followed as the MC announced first her English then Cherokee name.  
(Leotie, ‘Flower of the prarie’)  
Piper gathered her shawl closer over her shoulders, the soft fabric clinging to her clothes. She and Annabeth had spent weeks carefully stitching and embroidering the fabric, and adding specially made chainette fringe to the bottom. This dance, the outfit, the competition had all been months in the making.  
The drums rang out over the stage and the low tones of throat singing created a melody.  
Piper danced.   
Months ago, Piper could barely walk across her bedroom, Cancer treatment had brought her life to a standstill and left her unable to do most things for herself. She had been ragged, worn and exhausted.  
The tassels on her shawl whirled around her, creating a waterfall of colour and movement as she spun. Dust kicked up around her feet as she leapt and twirled to the rhythm of the music. Her very being sung, no longer with pain but with exhilaration.  
Months ago, Piper could barely look at Annabeth, guilt and self-hatred made her unable to face her, she let herself fall into the trap of considering herself a burden and was so self-involved that she didn’t see that Annabeth had done the same.   
She crossed the floor with ease, her feet skipping and gliding across the stage. The lights blinded her and her heart beat fast in her ears. Piper spun and soared, the flicker of her skirt like petals flickering.   
Months ago, Piper had no control over her life. She was dull and ashen, felt that everything she was experiencing was too much, unendurable. She let her isolation build mountains on her back.  
Now in illuminated by the spotlight above her, her fiancé in the audience, she felt welcome and solid no longer inhabiting every place but her own head, learning to inhabit a body that was nearly a murder scene.  
Now, glorious and brilliant, Piper felt love and belonging and purpose – palpable, inevitable and beautiful.

**Author's Note:**

> thank u for making it this far lmao. y'all can follow my pjo blog on tumblr @peacefulpercy or my main @baptiism


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